Ecuador

Sharks and other politicians

A stumbling approach to conservation

SHARKS do not evoke the same kind of cuddly feelings as dolphins or baby seals. But when last month Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, relaxed a ban on the trade in sharks' fins (a highly-prized delicacy in east Asia), he unleashed a storm of protest. That was partly because his government ordered the arrest of a member of Sea Shepherd, an American green group, for taking part in a police raid on fin traffickers. But it was also because the episode highlighted an inconsistent approach to environmental policy by a government that has several green activists in its ranks.

On taking office in January, Mr Correa inherited a pressing environmental problem. For its size, Ecuador is the world's most biodiverse country. With just 0.2% of the earth's land surface, it hosts 18% of its bird species. Tourism, much of it ecological, is now the third-biggest foreign-exchange earner. But with a struggling economy and unstable politics, Ecuador has fallen behind rivals such as Peru and Costa Rica in environmental conservation. In June UNESCO placed the Galapagos Islands on its list of endangered World Heritage Sites.

In a demonstration of his green credentials, Mr Correa named Eliécer Cruz, a former director of the Galapagos National Park, as the islands' governor. He also unveiled an ambitious, if implausible, plan to persuade the world to pay Ecuador not to extract a billion barrels of oil from the Amazon jungle. But he then replaced the scheme's author, Alberto Acosta, as energy minister.

Others in the government argue that conservation should not trump development. “It's very easy to be an environmentalist,” said Carlos Vallejo, the agriculture minister, recently. “Many of them come from well-off families.” Their campaigns amounted to criticising the poor, who were merely trying to put food on the table, he said.

Greens saw Mr Correa's decree allowing the sale of the fins of sharks “accidentally” caught in fishing nets as a bid to win the votes of some 200,000 fishermen in an election for a Constituent Assembly later this month. Fins fetch $60-80 per kilo in local markets—far more than any other catch. Four-fifths of the sharks are caught in the waters of the Galapagos, where fishermen and the eco-tourist industry have long collided. Greens also worry that the government's plans for a new constitution will weaken conservation by devolving powers to regulate sensitive industries, such as shrimp farming and flower-growing, to local governments.

Faced with a public outcry, fuelled by gory images of dead sharks with the fins hacked off, ministers opened talks with Fundación Natura, the main green NGO, over changes to the decree. “Just because we're not 100% environmentalists, doesn't mean we aren't [environmentalists]”, says Fernando Bustamante, the security minister.